Marshall Lager

Marshall Lager is the founder of Third Idea Consulting, a firm founded to provide advice on the confluence of customer relationship management (CRM), social media, and brand awareness. He is waiting to hear what you have to say. Connect with him on Twitter or Google+.

Articles by Marshall:

Nobody outside of CRM cares about how mobility affects business.

Mobile technology has been with us for a long time now, and the mobile phone in particular changed the way we live and work. In the CRM industry, we spend a lot of time focused on how mobility has changed the way sales people work. It’s time to remember the other side, because CRM is supposed to be about the customer. It is customer relationship management after all. And in the long run, we are all customers of something.

To put it more succinctly, nobody outside of CRM cares about how mobility affects business.

Quick—what image pops into your head when you think of the word salespeople? Chances are you get something more like salesperson, and then multiply it. This is a problem.

The popular concept of a salesperson is very much a single person exerting individual effort. While their activities benefit the organization as a whole, they operate alone and compete for commissions. To succeed, you must be a solo hunter. A lone wolf.

Bollocks to that. In nature, a lone wolf is usually a dead wolf. Wolves are pack hunters; they share the effort of chasing their prey until it’s exhausted and on unfavorable ground, then they team up for the kill. A single wolf is a nearly full-time scavenger under ideal conditions, and isn’t likely to survive without a pack. Two or three wolves working together can bring down an animal much larger than the two of them combined, and wolves typically run with much larger numbers than that.

Not so long ago, I wrote a Pint of View column about CRM being a balancing act between expectations at the extreme ends of the tech scale. It got me (and, hopefully, some readers) thinking about an uncomfortable question. Does every company need a CRM system?

It’s uncomfortable because the answer strikes at the root of a multi-billion dollar industry. It calls into question all the advice given by me and others like me over the years. I’m not about to pretend that anything I write or say can collapse an industry, but it can cause a bunch of tiny existential crises for those of us who navel-gaze.

Long story short, I’m weaseling my way out of this one. The answer is, “It depends.”